Monday, March 21, 2016

The hard-Left online organ Salon has discovered the secret of Donald Trump’s success: “Islamophobia.” Citing the American National Election Studies 2016 pilot survey, Salon solemnly intones that “Trump supporters are far more likely to express Islamophobic attitudes than other respondents, even other Republicans.” A “stunning 60 percent of Trump supporters” expressed the “Islamophobic” idea that “the word ‘violent’ describes Muslims ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ well.” Salon cannot fathom how anyone could possibly have gotten the idea that Muslims are violent (even including “a bit more than a quarter of Democrats”), and neither can the dominant voices in the Democratic Party. This blind spot regarding jihad terror is nothing less than Democratic Party policy.

Salon demonstrates its myopia about the problem of jihad terror when it notes that “for comparison, only 7 percent of Trump supporters said that the word ‘violent’ describes white people extremely or very well.” “White people”? What about Islamic jihad terrorists who are “white people,” such as al-Qaeda’s late sometime spokesman Adam Gadahn, the Boston Marathon jihad bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would-be Wichita airport jihad bomber Terry Lee Loewen, and so many others? Salon doesn’t consider them: for the Left, and for the Democratic Party in particular, concern about jihad terror is just another form of racism, and that’s that. White Muslim jihad terrorists simply don’t exist.

They don’t exist for Bernie Sanders, either. Last October, a Muslim student, Remaz Abdelgader, referred to Ben Carson’s statements about not wanting a Muslim President and said to Sanders: “Being an American is such a strong part of my identity, but I want to create a change in this society. I’m so tired of listening to this rhetoric saying I can’t be president one day, that I should not be in office. It makes me so angry and upset. This is my country.” Sanders replied: “If we stand for anything we have to stand together and end all forms of racism in this country. I will lead that effort as president.”

What race is Islam again? What race is Sharia oppression of women, non-Muslims, gays again? That was what the controversy over Carson’s remarks was really about: he raised a legitimate question about the compatibility of Sharia and the U.S. Constitution. Sharia denies the freedom of speech and the equality of rights of women and non-Muslims before the law, and contravenes the Constitution in other ways as well. In 1960, John Kennedy was subjected to baseless prejudice as a Roman Catholic, and today Sanders and others consigns concerns about a Muslim President to an analogous baseless prejudice. But Kennedy actually addressed concerns, and assured Americans that he would obey and enforce the Constitution and no other law. Nowadays, asking a hypothetical Muslim candidate if he would obey and enforce the Constitution and not Sharia, as far as the leading lights in the Democratic Party are concerned, is “racism.”

So what would happen if a Sharia-compliant Muslim candidate did become President, and began working against the freedoms that the Constitution allows but Sharia does not? Would all those who voted for him simply congratulate themselves on their resistance to “racism” as their freedoms were eroded away?

The likely nominee is no better. Last November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” How will President Hillary Clinton have the slightest chance of defeating the Islamic State when she is so divorced from reality as to say something like this? Obviously an uncomfortable number of Muslims do in fact have something to do with terrorism, and the fact that many do not says nothing whatsoever about whether or not Islam contains teachings and exhortations that make all too many Muslims believe that it is actually our adversary.

Both Sanders and Clinton were just playing to the Democratic Party base – the base that is sure that “white people” are just as violent oreven more violent than Muslims, and that concern about jihad terror is “racism.” The aptly-named Party of Treason’s refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the challenge of jihad terror only ensures that, whoever becomes President on January 20, 2017, there will be in the U.S. in the coming years much, much more jihad terror.